Just This Once

by Judith Arnold

  She pictured Nicky, bright and chipper in his crisp white medical jacket, crepe-soled shoes and inverted sailor hat, standing in his sun-filled kitchen and drinking water because coffee might stain his teeth. The kids would be clamoring around him, throwing Cheerios and raisins at each other, and Kathy would be hovering nearby, pretending not to eavesdrop on the conversation. One good reason Loretta was in no hurry to get married and become a parent was that people who got married and became parents wound up wide awake at seven in the morning.

  “The blind date was fine,” she said.

  “What was the guy’s name again? Joseph or something?”

  “Josh. Joshua, I guess.”

  “Joshua? What kind of name is that?”

  In the background, Loretta heard Kathy say, “It’s Biblical, Nicky.”

  “So the date went well?” Nicky said into the phone.

  “It was fine. I’m tired.”

  “Why? Were you out late with him? Jesus, Loretta—he’s not there with you now, is he?”

  “Of course not,” she retorted, wondering whether hanging up on Nicky would precipitate a major family crisis.

  “All right, well, I was just asking. I mean, you’re a single girl in the city, am I right? A man might make assumptions. But if he took advantage, you know? He’d have to answer to me. I’m not kidding.”

  “What’s your point, Nicky?”

  “Okay, okay—” He seemed to be addressing Kathy, but then his voice returned stronger. “So, you had fun?”

  “Do we really have to talk about this now? It’s seven in the morning. I’m not even up yet.”

  “I wanted to catch you before you left for work. Everybody wants to know how the date went. Mom, Dad, Kathy, Al…”

  “You all need a life. Maybe you should organize a family outing to see a movie. Then you can talk about that instead.”

  “The thing is, you survived, right? You survived this blind date.”

  She wasn’t sure where he was heading, and given that this was Nicky, she wasn’t sure she should follow him there. “And?” she said cautiously.

  “And, I was thinking, why not try another blind date? With Marty this time. I’m telling you, Loretta—”

  “Whatever you’re telling me, I’m not interested. Okay? I agreed to go on a blind date just this once, because my job was at stake. Your friend Marty can do nothing to help me keep my job. So there’s no reason for me to go on a date with him.”

  “There are plenty of reasons,” Nicky argued. “He’s good looking.”

  “Yeah, right. Mel Gibson, only taller.” The brightening sunlight seeped into her apartment and pressed against her eyelids. She rolled onto her side, facing away from the window, and again toyed with the idea of hanging up on her brother. She could say they got accidentally disconnected. She could blame it on technology.

  “And he’s Italian, Loretta, you know? Calabrese. A paesano, capisce?”

  Oh, great. Now Nicky was going to do his Godfather routine. For God’s sake, he’d grown up in Plainview, not Palermo. “I’ll let you in on a secret, Nicky,” she said. “I hate your friend Marty. I’ve never even met him, but I hate him because you keep pushing him on me. See? It’s your fault I will never go on a blind date with him.”

  Nicky clearly didn’t know what to say to that. He laughed. “That’s a joke, right?”

  “I’ve got to go,” she grumbled. “Give Alyssa and Terror a hug from Aunt Loretta. I’ll see you later.”

  “Yeah, okay.” He paused. “That was a joke, right?”

  “Good-bye, Nicky.” She hung up the phone.

  Silence surrounded her—New York silence, which was actually fairly noisy. Loretta could hear the whoosh of running water as her upstairs neighbor took a shower, the hum of her refrigerator’s motor, the distant rumble of traffic and the metallic stutter of a jackhammer outside. But compared to her conversation with Nicky, those were soothing sounds, sounds that left her mind free to slip back into unconsciousness—or into those dark thoughts that lurked in wait when a person lay in bed, too tired to escape.

  She didn’t want to slip into those thoughts again, but there they were, as unavoidable as the mud puddle at the bottom of a slide in the playground on a rainy afternoon when you’re halfway down the slide and accelerating. You know you’re going to hit the puddle and splatter water everywhere, and probably ruin your sneakers, too, but you can’t stop your descent.

  She couldn’t stop descending into thoughts about Josh Kaplan. Specifically, thoughts about the last couple of minutes she’d spent with him, when he’d kissed her.

  He’d called himself a son of a bitch, and he’d been right. How could he do that to her? How could he kiss her so briefly, so casually, and yet leave her so totally hot and bothered?

  She’d been simmering and squirming last night when Donna had phoned. “Did you wear the teddy?” Donna had asked, making Loretta angry with herself that she had. Maybe if she’d stuck to her cotton Hanes-Her-Way underwear, his kiss wouldn’t have had such an impact on her.

  Or maybe her underwear had been irrelevant last night. Maybe Josh’s kiss would have done it to her even if she’d been wearing a haz-mat suit. Maybe she’d responded not because wearing the damned teddy made her feel womanly, but because Josh was so manly.

  What was it about him, anyway? He wasn’t macho. He wasn’t cool. He wasn’t a movie-star-caliber hunk, although those beautiful eyes of his… Well, okay, so he had spectacular eyes and a nice build and a contagious smile. But he wasn’t the sort of guy who’d freeze women in their tracks so they could gawk at him.

  And he really shouldn’t have kissed her. Loretta wasn’t a prude, she’d read a book on situation ethics in college, and she believed that how individual couples worked out their fidelity issues was none of her business. But she personally wouldn’t choose to start anything with a man who had a girlfriend. She and Josh had discussed not looking for romance. They’d had an understanding.

  So why had he kissed her?

  She knew why: he’d let his testosterone do the thinking for him. The real question was, why had she kissed him back? Why had she felt so incredibly aroused standing outside the door with him, reveling in the heat and pressure of his mouth on hers? Why had it taken all her willpower to stop him when what she’d wanted was to go further, deeper, to find out how he kissed when he wasn’t holding back, to find out how he did everything else when he wasn’t holding back?

  It could be that she was just plain horny. She and Gary had broken up in February, and now it was nearly July. She was twenty-nine, which, her family’s opinion notwithstanding, was not the same thing as being dead.

  If her response to Josh was only due to horniness, she could solve that problem with any reasonably decent man. It didn’t have to be Josh Kaplan—and it shouldn’t be, since he had a girlfriend. Nor could it be Bob, because not only did he have a girlfriend but Loretta worked with him. Maybe Marty Calabrese would fit the bill.

  Ugh.

  She didn’t want to get naked—or even wear her teddy—with Nicky’s friend Marty. Or with Bob. She’d known Bob for a long time, spent many hours with him both in and out of the office, and never felt the least twinge of excitement in his presence. Whereas with Josh…with his bedroom eyes and his quiet laugh…

  Her alarm clicked on, filling the studio apartment with an ear-worm worthy jingle. She slapped the button on her cell phone to turn the sound off, then sat up and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. The hell with it, the hell with everything. She was never going to wear the teddy again. She was never going to kiss Josh again. In fact, she might never phone him again, even though she’d promised him she would. She was never going to spare him another thought, because thinking about him gave her agita.

  She’d done what she had to do. Now Becky Blake had better not fire her.

  ***

  Kate was eating baby carrots when Loretta entered the staff room. “Those aren’t green,” she s
aid.

  Kate stared at her zip-lock bag of carrots for a minute, then shrugged. “I’m not on the green diet anymore. It didn’t work. I discovered this stuff called grasshopper pie. It was green and I gained three pounds eating it. But enough about me. How did the date go?”

  Loretta sighed and edged back toward the door. “Fine. Who wants coffee?”

  “Bob will get coffee,” Gilda announced. She stood at the white board, writing lists, her earrings glittering in the brassy overhead light. Bob was sprawled out on the sofa, but he sat up at Loretta’s entrance. His impish smile unsettled Loretta.

  “I don’t mind getting the coffee,” she said.

  “Bob will get it,” Gilda insisted. “You will sit down and tell us about your date.”

  “I want to hear about her date, too,” Bob complained. “I don’t want her spilling all the juicy details while I’m in the lounge spilling the coffee. After all, Josh Kaplan is my lawyer.” He sounded persuasive, as if he’d come to believe this fib himself.

  “Fine. Then she’ll wait for you to get the coffee. The sooner you get it, the sooner we can all hear about her date.”

  Bob didn’t seem pleased. “Sure, I’ll get the coffee. They don’t even have any mocha latté up here,” he grumbled as he strode out of the room.

  “You want a carrot?” Kate extended the bag to Loretta.

  She shook her head. She’d had a hard enough time forcing down a dry breadstick and a glass of orange juice at home. Carrots at nine-thirty did not strike her as appetizing. “I’m not hungry.”

  “I think she’s in love,” Kate said to Gilda.

  “Think again,” Loretta snapped.

  Gilda nodded solemnly. “Either she’s in love or she has PMS. The symptoms are similar.”

  “What symptoms?”

  “That pallor,” Gilda said, pointing in the general direction of Loretta’s cheeks.

  “The grouchiness,” Kate added.

  “An apparent lack of adequate sleep. You’ve got bags under your eyes.”

  “You look bloated,” Kate said.

  That was a patent lie. Loretta looked the way she always did—the bags under her eyes were fast becoming a permanent fixture, and her stomach was no puffier than usual. She did not have PMS. What she had was an overactive imagination that circled relentlessly around her memory of kissing Josh outside her building last night. “The evening went well,” she reported, “but we didn’t fall in love.”

  “Wait.” Gilda held up her hand to silence her. “Wait until Bob gets back. It’s his lawyer, after all.”

  With another sigh, Loretta turned to stare at the Parthenon on the wall poster.

  Bob returned to the team’s room, balancing three full cups in his large hands. He set them on the table and Loretta reached for one. “Now, tell us about last night,” he ordered her.

  “It was fine.” She kept her voice as even as possible so no one would detect any emotion. She wasn’t in love, of course not; Kate was crazy if she thought such a thing was possible. But Loretta allowed that she might just be a little bit in lust, and if her colleagues figured that out, they’d cause her all kinds of grief. They’d probably come up with a new topic for the show—twenty-nine-year-old single women in lust—and make her appear on it.

  “Just fine?” Gilda pressed her.

  “The restaurant was lousy. And the play was worse. They got us tickets for this thing called ‘Three Dead Corpses’.”

  “That’s supposed to be hilarious,” Bob noted.

  “It sounds pretty morbid for a first date,” Kate remarked.

  “Harold probably got the tickets for free,” Gilda added.

  “That’s my guess,” Loretta said. “It was horrible. It was about corpses. Then we went out for espresso and then Josh walked me home. And that was it.”

  “No good-night kiss?” Kate asked.

  Loretta felt her cheeks grow warm. She hid behind her coffee cup so she could blame her sudden feverishness on the steam rising from the cup. “I hardly even know the guy.”

  “So? You still could have kissed him. He was pretty cute for a white boy.”

  “He was very cute,” Gilda agreed.

  The door burst open and Becky waltzed in, a summery vision in peach and ecru. “Loretta! How was your date?” she asked.

  “They didn’t kiss,” Kate said, eyeing Loretta as if she wasn’t sure she believed this assertion. “But the consensus is, they should have.”

  “That’s your consensus,” Loretta muttered.

  “If I’d gone out with him, I sure would have kissed him,” Bob deadpanned.

  “He seemed like a very nice man.” Becky flitted around the room like a peach blossom on a breeze. “A little prickly, and what was that all about? His odd fixation with cell phones. But he was good looking. His eyes were amazing. I’ve viewed the tapes, and they look very green on the monitor.”

  “That’s why I would have kissed him,” Bob murmured. “Those amazing green eyes.” Loretta forced a laugh, but his comment cut way too close for comfort.

  “Harold was very impressed with what he saw. We’re going to push up the broadcast date to next Monday. He wants us to get started with the kinder, gentler shows, and he thinks this’ll be a terrific launch.”

  Good. Maybe I won’t get laid off, Loretta thought.

  “He wants to see the audience response to this show before we attempt any more blind date shows. But in the meantime, we need to decide whether to have a follow-up show with Loretta and Josh.”

  “And his amazing eyes,” Bob said, shooting Loretta a conspiratorial look. She realized he was allying himself with her and mocking Becky. She appreciated his support, even though every time he mentioned Josh’s amazing eyes she spun back in time to last night and Josh’s amazing kiss.

  “First off, Loretta,” Becky said, positioning herself so the light would wash evenly over her smooth features, “I need to know how the date went.”

  “It was fine.” Becky was the last person Loretta would ever choose to confide in about a date. If they were stranded alone on a tropical island and Loretta had no one else to bare her soul to, she would have talked to a coconut before she traded intimacies with Becky.

  “Love at first sight?” Becky asked.

  “No.”

  “Nor second sight, either,” Bob murmured. Loretta would have kicked him if he were at the table, but he’d returned to lounging on the couch.

  “Will you see him again?” Becky questioned her.

  God, this was like a courtroom cross-examination. Or, even worse, a family interrogation. “I’m sure I’ll see him next Monday, when the show goes on the air.”

  Becky pouted, clearly disappointed by Loretta’s flippant answer. “Not on TV, Loretta. In person. Will you see him again?”

  “I don’t know.” Yes, she thought, she would see him again. The reason she’d promised to call Josh was that she knew she would want to see him again. Even if he hadn’t had amazing eyes, she would want to see him again. She’d liked talking to him and laughing with him. Besides, they’d survived “Three Dead Corpses” together. You didn’t just walk away from someone who’d accompanied you through such an ordeal. It was one of those bonding experiences, like Marine Corps boot camp or sitting next to each other in a lifeboat from the Titanic.

  But she wasn’t going to tell Becky that.

  “What I’m getting at, Loretta, is do we want to put you and Josh back on the air?”

  “Yes,” Kate bellowed, drowning out Loretta’s emphatic “No!”

  “If there are sparks between Loretta and her blind date, I think we would be remiss in not sharing those sparks with our audience.” Kate sounded nauseatingly sanctimonious. “The audience was in it at the beginning. They should be in it in the middle.”

  What if there was no middle? What if she and Josh had already reached the end?

  Damn it—she didn’t want to be at the end with Josh. He could have his
girlfriend, he could have his gorgeous eyes—she still wanted to see him. Just to talk, to schmooze, to quote lines from “Three Dead Corpses” and laugh together.

  She would call him. She had to, if only to inform him of the show’s broadcast date. He might want to alert his friends and family. He might want to fly down to Florida and take his long-distance sweetheart to the beach for the day so she wouldn’t have access to a TV set.

  Loretta would call him, and they’d talk, and it would be fine. They had already decided they were old friends, so why not become new friends?

  If she didn’t wear her teddy with him, they ought to be able to manage a friendship well enough.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The last Sunday in June was a scorcher. By the time Josh had parked the lawnmower in his mother’s garage, he felt as if his body was more sweat than flesh. He almost expected to hear a sloshing sound under his skin as he mopped his face with the hem of his T-shirt and staggered into the air-conditioned kitchen.

  “Mom?” he called out. “Have you got any beer?” He already knew the answer, but hope sprang eternal.

  His mother wandered into the kitchen from the living room, the Sunday New York Times Magazine in her hand. A faint, flowery scent seeped out of the pages as they fluttered—one of those perfume samples, probably. He’d rather be inhaling fumes from the lawnmower.

  But he’d tolerate the cloying fragrance if it meant he could surround himself with air conditioning and drink a beer. He had a suspicion he was going to wind up one-for-two.

  “I don’t have any beer,” his mother said, fulfilling his expectations. “I’ve got some Diet Coke.”

  Cold and wet. It would do. He swung open the refrigerator and inspected its contents, most of which were sealed inside plastic containers in a variety of shapes and sizes. He spotted a can of soda—some no-name diet cola. “This isn’t Diet Coke,” he complained as he slid it off the shelf.

  “It’s the same thing,” his mother told him.

  It was the same thing as Diet Coke the way Ice House Lite was the same thing as Sam Adams. But he was too thirsty to argue with his mother. He popped the top, tipped the can against his lips and guzzled half the can’s contents without even tasting them.